Interviews

Gary Gygax Interview - Part I

Gygax: Well, it was just great. I had done something that so many people were having a great time with. I obviously love the game and I loved sharing with so many people. It's a great sense of camaraderie.

GameSpy: So it goes for a couple of years, gets really popular, then in the early '80s a backlash begins. People are saying that the game encourages devil worship and causes kids to commit suicide.

Gygax: That really pushed the sales up. [Laughs]

GameSpy: Well, I know it didn't hurt the game from a sales perspective, but it certainly must have been difficult to laugh with people saying your game is causing kids to commit suicide and that you're teaching them to summon demons.

Gygax: No. I know it's a lie, so it's not difficult at all. I mean, there wasn't a shred of evidence or veracity in any of those claims. I knew it, and a lot of people told me that, including mothers of two of the children who had committed suicide. One of them said the only reason that her son didn't kill himself sooner was because he enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons and that this was all just a cock-and-bull story

GameSpy: Thirty years on, most people look back on the hysteria over D&D and say to themselves, "What the hell were we thinking?" At the time, though, did you feel like, 'Oh, my God. Why are they saying these things?'

Gygax: No, I think I understood their motivations. Some of them were very sincere -- their ignorance was sincere. Some, though, were very, very calculating, and made moves just to get money out of people. The poor woman (Pat Pulling - ed.) who started B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons - ed.) said in her first interview in the newspaper that she hadn't known her son was playing D&D for two years. I mean, that's a serious failure of parenting. Clearly she was transferring blame for her own failure to a game. It was sad.

GameSpy: Do you find it interesting that what D&D went through in the '80s and comic books went through in the early '50's is so similar to what video games are going through now?

Gygax: Oh yeah. The idea that a game is anything more than a game You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard.

GameSpy: Looking back now, can you be a little more philosophical about it?

Gygax: In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game -- 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.

GameSpy: That just sucks. How do you feel about what's happened in the years since the controversy?

Gygax: Well, I'm glad that most people have been able to separate the fantasy of the game from the reality of real life -- games have nothing to do with real life. There are no real dragons, there's no real magic, no real magic swords, and certainly no real treasure or I would have retired at home by now.

Tomorrow: Gary discusses being forced out of TSR and his life and career after Dungeons & Dragons.